Note 492 — Chapter CII

The editor also remained a whole day at Pucara in 1860, looking at everything, but more than three centuries had elapsed since the visit of Cieza de Leon, and there is no longer a vestige of the ruins mentioned in the text. Pucara is a little town at the foot of an almost perpendicular mountain, which closely resembles the northern end of the rock of Gibraltar. The precipice is composed of a reddish sandstone, and is upwards of twelve hundred feet above the plain, the crevices and summit being clothed with long grass and shrubby queñuas (Polylepis tomentella Wedd.) Here Francisco Hernandez Giron, the rebel who led an insurrection to oppose the abolition of personal service amongst the Indians, was finally defeated in 1554. In 1860 the aged cura, Dr. José Faustino Dasa, was one of the best Quichua scholars in Peru.